AT and meditation

I have just returned from a ten day silent meditation retreat. Being silent for ten days is the easy part, believe me. To sit still and observe your own mind for 10 hours a day is harder than you might imagine. After a while you start to ache all over and no position is comfortable.

I’m sure it was helpful that I have a well-tuned sense of proprioception (what I call our ‘body sense’) which in turn leads to a well-tuned posture. It was definitely good to be able to feel how my head balances on the top of my spine, the supporting curves of my back and the alignment of my torso over my sitting bones. Body sense is what tells us where exactly each part of the body is located in space and where it is in relation to any other part: It’s how we can walk through doorways without bumping in to the side, or get food into our mouth using a fork. Body sense is the first thing we work on in an AT lesson.

I also employed another AT principle, direction, to keep my body soft and strong. I like to call this principle directional or intentional thinking and it’s a particular way of directing our conscious thought processes to affect the tone of our muscles at both a deep and superficial level (it is after all, a neuro-muscular system). My upcoming workshop will be all about this (see below*)

In an AT lesson I help you to find appropriate words or images that are tailored to your unique holding pattern and learning style which can then be used at any time to unravel and release layers of unconscious muscle tension.

Of course I still experienced pain during the long hours of meditation. However I came to realise that my pain was as much a mental phenomenon as a physical one. In fact maybe even more so. Pain is a universal experience. We all know what it like to feel pain, yet little do we understand what it is. It is becoming clearer to me how we can influence our pain system and how it affects us. Over the last couple of months I’ve been studying pain science with UK- based neuroscientist, Tim Cacciatore and pain management expert, Mari Hodges in the US. It has been eye-opening for me. I’ll share some of my thoughts in the next post…

If you are Auckland-based please join me for my next free workshop on 21st June in Oneroa, Waiheke Island. Places are limited due to space constraints so do book ahead using this link: https://events.humanitix.com/thinking-and-feeling-an-introduction-to-the-alexander-technique